Supporting Notes

As supporting notes The practitioner we were most inspired by was Katie Mitchell. The crucial idea behind Katie Mitchell is that of Stanislavsky, naturalistic but with a contemporary twist. We chose to explore an extract from Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen. Being, a naturalistic play, we thought that by using Katie Mitchell as our practitioner, we would be able to put a slight twist onto the dated play, and gain more knowledge of the characters. This involved us researching the era of the play, the characters with depth, and the specific extract we were choosing to do. Katie Mitchell focused on exploring the characters with much depth, and allowing a real portrayal to be shown to the audience, in order for them to relate to. After researching into the background of Katie Mitchell, we found that she directed Ghost, another Ibsen play, which encouraged us to explore other Ibsen plays. This led us to Hedda Gabler, a naturalistic play in which we believed we could adapt and direct to suit Katie Mitchell’s style of play. By following the book ‘The Director’s Craft’, we could gain an insight into her ways of directing and how she believes you should work in order to achieve a certain style of play. The exploration of the characters within the play, allowed us to record a backlist of what we believe may have happened, allowing a bigger picture to form in which we could establish what we thought the play was trying to achieve. This allowed us to create more believable characters and discuss what we believe to of happened between the time gaps between the scenes. Katie Mitchell’s idea of performing a play is that to completely immerse yourself within a character, and imagine you are them from all angles, this allows us to understand emotions and feelings behind the character. We chose an extract mainly reliant upon having two female speaking parts, however, allowed a good scope to improve and explore acting styles to suit this extract. Although the play didn’t advise...